20131126: Thriller Review--Breaking the Girls

Breaking the Girls

1. Production Fundamentals; reception
1. American live action feature length film, 2013, NR, 86 minutes, crime, thriller.  Spoken word is in English.
2. IMDB: 4.7/10.0 from 975 audience ratings.
3. Rotten Tomatoes:  13% on the meter; 25% liked it from 186 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 2.9/5.0 from 5,037 audience ratings.
5. Directed by Jamie Babbit; screenplay by Mark Distefano and Guinevere Turner.
6. Starring: Agnes Bruckner as Sara Ryan, Madeline Zima as Alex Layton, Shanna Collins as Brooke Potter, Sam Anderson as Professor Nolan, Shawn Ashmore as Eric Nolan, Manish Dayal as Tim, Kate Levering as Nina Layton, John Stockwell as David Layton.


2. Setup, Plot
1. Parties, booze, back biting bad behaviour set at a school with a law program.


2. Sara (from the lower class) is on scholarship and works more than one job.  She and Eric like one another.  Brooke wants Eric to herself.  Alex (from old money) is a lesbian Cassanova who wants Sara because she's straight and because she thinks Sara is vulnerable.  Brooke (another privileged young woman) gets Sara fired from her job, which gets her scholarship revoked, and gets her kicked out of housing.  Alex's step mom (real mom died in swimming pool) is five years older than Alex, and quite nasty to Alex (like don't visit home without calling first).  The heat comes from Alex's father, though.


3. So, Brooke and Nina are the obvious targets.  Sarah despises Brooke, and Alex despises Nina.  So, Sara and Alex discuss this, but not really at any length.


4. Alex kills Brooke and frames Sara, then kills her father and frames Sara.  Nice.


5. Were there important missing pieces that Sara needs to know about? Will Sara be able to extricate herself from the murder charges?  Will everything we think we know be thrown out in the last three minutes?


3. Conclusions
1. Deep into the PC here: public drunkenness is good,  kleptomania is good, littering is good, drugs are nice, stealing at work is good, extortion is par for the course, men can accomplish nothing, while women commit all the decisive acts.  Last but not least, if one is clever enough, one can get away with murders.
2. Remind anyone of the much better film Strangers on a Train (1951)?  A second film of higher quality to watch with similar topics would be Bound (1996) with the talented Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon as the lesbian criminal duo.
3. One line summary: Lesbian relationship with a psychotic liar has bad consequences.
4. Two stars of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 8/10 Mostly fine; camera a bit wobbly now and then.


2. Sound: 8/10 OK.


3. Acting: 2/10 The only good acting I saw in this film came from Sam Anderson and John Stockwell; both performances were short.  The other performances were between sub-par and bad.  The relationship between Alex and Sara was not believable.  Shawn Ashmore does better with a stronger director.


4. Screenplay: 4/10 Derivative and boring.  For a bright person trained in the law, Sara navigates her situation very poorly.  The exposition of motivation was not all that good, and the poor acting did not help.  The turnaround in the plot at the end was a fairly nice touch in terms of plot, but was also yet another full-scale affirmation of corruption.  There were so many in this film.